Most display technologies today display colors calibrated for a single, fixed environment. For example, many displays today are designed to show colors that look correct under the D65 illuminant using the sRGB color system, which approximates the colors found in daylight. After dark, our homes are lit by much warmer light, and device displays, including computers, cell phones, and other devices do not adapt to this change, making their displays look “blue” when viewed in dark rooms.
Recent studies report that in the United States, adults 45-55 years of age spent over nine hours a day viewing a screen (i.e. electronic visual display) of some kind. Computer screens and displays represent a large portion of total viewing time. Thus, the quality of the screen viewing experience is important from health and aesthetic standpoints. An important aspect of screen viewing experience is color quality. It can be appreciated that the entire screen is what impacts the viewer, and adjustments to the entire screen are needed to adjust color quality.
Currently color correction is generally limited to particular static environments, such as, for example, digital display calibration [ex. ICC-1931: ICM/WCS and in particular applications such as Photoshop, which implement digital color management using a combination of software and hardware].
The aesthetics of interior design have motivated creation of products to alter room lighting over time. See, for example, architectural lighting products from companies such as Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions, formerly Color Kinetics. Certain interior room lighting may be manually adjusted for aesthetics (e.g., Herman Miller's Leaf Light). Electronic displays for personal computing, for example, are prominent features in working and living space. However, illumination sources such as emissions from computer monitors and other display type light sources have not been integrated into aesthetic design plans. Moreover, existing consumer products featuring variable lighting illumination are limited, offering a few settings corresponding to pre-determined illuminations. No such devices provide the ability to modify illumination either manually or automatically as a function of real-time environmental characteristics.
Some attempts have been made to optimize viewing of, for example, television screens. However, such adaptations mainly involve some automatic brightness adaptation and some corresponding automatic color adjustments, as part of brightness adaptation. The challenge of computer monitors is not solely a question of screen brightness, but rather is more complicated, including issues created by color sensing and color perception, as the conditions under which the screen is being used and viewed change. What is needed is a means of enabling a computer or other display screen device to adapt the electronic visual display, taking into account the conditions the user is experiencing at the time of screen viewing.
Tone mapping has addressed some challenges associated with computer displays. However tone mapping primarily concerns itself with challenges associated with brightness perception.
Device illumination characteristics do not alter as illumination changes during sunrise or sunset, for example. Because human perception of color is strongly affected by environmental factors such as changes in sunlight, the un-adapted color of display devices may jar and even strain human eyes. What is needed is the ability to manually or automatically adjust illumination characteristics of electronic displays where such adjustment corresponds to the illumination characteristics of the user's real-time environment.
Currently, electronic displays implement color correction according to standards. “CIE-1931” defined Kelvin color temperatures and these have been used for many years in software/hardware calibration solutions. The “sRGB” standard provides a way to display RGB colors and is the standard color space used on the Web. Brightness, or intensity, adjustment in displays is common, and brightness can be automatically or manually set in appliances of many types, from alarm clocks to microwave ovens to cameras to mobile phones. But brightness is only one feature of illumination, and display color is different than display brightness.
Current electronic display systems do not dynamically adjust a display's color based on ambient conditions. Most assume “fixed” room lighting and controlled conditions. Moreover, no account is taken for the changes in human perception of color and other lighting characteristics experienced in a twenty-four hour light cycle.
What is needed is a means to beneficially effect changes in light attributable to light emitting, projecting or reflective appliances and display devices. What is further needed is a system for automatically correcting display devices to correct for perception of color in a variety of environmental illumination conditions.